Adobe Flash Player Enables Hardware-Accelerated Decoding on Mac

While Apple may have turned their back on Adobe’s Flash technology, the same cannot be said for Adobe turning their back on Apple. After a lengthy beta period, Flash Player 10.1 is finally available and promises hardware-accelerated decoding and other goodies for recent Macs.

MacRumors is reporting that an otherwise modest security update on Tuesday for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 also brings with it hardware accelerated decoding for video content. That means smoother playback, lower system resource usage and even longer life for notebook users.

“We just pushed a few minutes ago a new version of the Flash Player 10.1.82.76 containing a nice feature that was in beta until now called ‘Gala,’” notes Adobe Flash project manager Thibault Imbert. “Yes, H.264 GPU decoding in Mac OSX is now officially enabled in the Flash Player. You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature.”

Flash Player 10.1 was actually released in June, but without the hardware acceleration for Mac OS X. Cutting-edge users were able to download a beta of the “Gala” preview release from Adobe Labs, however.

Comment

Adobe turned its back on Apple years ago by putting almost no development into Flash for the Mac until finally Apple forced them to by regularly commenting on the poorly resource utilization and crashiness of Flash. If you know anything about Macs you know this to be true so enough with feeling sorry for the incompetent and lazy Adobe.